Do any of you know who Cassandra is? You probably use or see her every day and you don’t even know her. No, seriously, have any of you web folks ever heard of Cassandra? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say…no.

Until recently, I hadn’t either. Who/what is Cassandra? The Apache Cassandra Project is another one of those great open-source projects. So, you’re probably thinking…”what’s the big deal?”. Oh, I don’t know, this particular open-source project happens to be in use at sites with the names Facebook, Twitter, and Digg; just to name a few.

The basic gist from the Cassandra project’s web site is this: “The Apache Cassandra Project develops a highly scalable second-generation distributed database…”.

And, along with the impressive client list, an interesting stat too:
“The largest production cluster has over 100 TB of data in over 150 machines.”.

Whew! That is pretty impressive.

My database background is in SQL, specifically MySQL, but I find this Cassandra project quite intriguing. In fact, I’ve already downloaded the necessary files to install it on my linux box at home. I’m going to try and take the time to get to know Cassandra, and I think you should too.